We step up on the creaky timber stairs and onto the small, broken-down verandah. The front door of the house is right there. I know what I have to do. I open the door – of course, it creaks loudly. If security were close by, they would come running to check it out – they don’t.
My two tween-age friends and I enter. The door slams behind us. It is seriously dark inside the house. Ten seconds in and some soft lights come on, these take the edge off the inky darkness. Spooky music starts playing and then the recordings of groaning noises kick in.
Damn it, whoever is responsible for turning this creepy, old haunted house ‘off’ has left it running.
We reluctantly hold on to each other and move forward as rubber skeleton hands, pieces of felt cloth, and goodness knows what else stroke our faces and arms from the ceiling and sides of the hallway.
A vampire’s face lights up from a framed picture on the wall. A voice from the image predictably states, “I VANT to SUCK your BLOOD.”
“Lame,” I hear one of my companions mutter under their breath.
A little further down the hallway, a woman robotically lurches out of a doorway. Despite her throat being cut she manages a blood-curdling scream.
Now, I knew about this mechanical lady’s appearance before it happened, we all did. You see, we’d been through the house once before, during the carnival’s operating hours. Even so, this mangled creature still scared the living daylights out of me… but I don’t let on to the others.
Following the hallway leads us to a dim, cobwebbed room. Thanks to a small, muted light, I could make out an imposing figure, standing up but slightly bent over, in the corner of the room. It was a man, or so it seemed, in a dark suit with his back to us.
“You said you would. Now do it,” a shaky voice from behind, quietly dared.
“The three of us approach him and say the words or this isn’t happening,” I whisper back.
A hand gently pushes me in the middle of my back. “We’re with you. Now let’s get this over and done with,” another whispered voice from the darkness impatiently utters.
So I find myself walking forward, I put my hand up and count down with my fingers silently – three, two, one – showing it is time to recite the words written in ‘blood’ on the wall. The three of us say in unison the words, “Sir, I believe you have a surprise for me.”
The damn contraption in the corner starts wiggling like it’s possessed. It stands completely upright and spins around revealing it is made up as a grotesque clown. The clown raises its arms as it slides its way on rails towards our small group, all the while heckling us with hideous laughter.
Now, let me explain at this point that I’ve never ever been a big fan of clowns – the wig, the red nose, the makeup, the odd clothing, and those ridiculously big shoes. I believe clowns wear makeup as a disguise to highlight, not hide, who they really are. Ugly, deceptive, evil creatures. Put simply, I hate them.
Earlier in the day, I was dared to take the nose off this very same clown and I am steeled to do my duty. I reach up, grab on and pull with so much force that I fall backward. It is only then, as I look around, I realise my comrades-in-arms have bravely deserted me. The now noseless clown begins its short but creaky, metallic-sounding return journey, jerking violently back into its original position in the corner.
I run like the wind – I don’t remember how I got home to the safety of my bedroom but here I am looking down at the trophy in my hand – a big, red clown nose. I pop it in my bedside table’s top drawer and try to get some sleep.
At first, adrenaline has me pumped but I eventually manage to start dozing off. It is at this point when an unholy, hinge-rattling, ‘BANG! BANG!’ on my bedroom door wakes me up.
I’m now fully awake and alert. My hands sweating. My heart pounding. My breathing was erratic. I fling open the door. There standing before me is Mr Noseless, the very unhappy clown, screaming, “WHY DID YOU STEAL MY NOSE? WHY DID YOU DO THAT? WHHHYYYY?”
Where his nose was, there now is a gaping hole with blood hemorrhaging out. As you would no doubt do in that situation, I scream blue murder and wake myself up.
And there you have my reoccurring dream. I am sure you will agree, it is a rather unpleasant dream. It is a nightmare that has grown in gruesome detail over time but the basics always remain the same. There is a haunted house at a Carnival, I go in, and steal the clown’s nose which causes the clown to chase me down to seek out some kind of hideous revenge.
I have had this delightful night-gasp since I was around 6 years old. As stated, the dream is always basically the same and I would always wake up screaming. I am now grown and married, so Noseless the Clown has had a lot of re-runs and I have a very understanding husband.
The thing that bothered me most about this troublesome night terror was why I was having it at all. What were its origins? How did it all begin?
Believe it or not, this is how I discovered the when, where, and why of my nightly torment.
I was hosting a work meeting, via teleconference, and had forgotten to include an icebreaker at the beginning so everyone felt more comfortable with each other. That was when, out of the blue, I asked participants to share their earliest memory.
Everyone had finished telling their early stories when someone said, “Sandra what’s your earliest memory?”.
I have to admit I don’t remember much from childhood. Just little snippets. It took this request from my colleague to jolt my memory and I started to tell a story I didn’t realise was there to be told in the first place.
My earliest memory goes a little something like this. I’m with mum and dad at a carnival. Mum and dad were arguing. Nothing new there. This time it happened to be about whether I was old enough, at age 6, to go into the carny’s haunted house.
Dad knows best. He hoists me up onto his hip, strides up, and pays for us. We enter the house while mum stays outside with a frown on her face.
Dad carries me through the house and just as we think we have survived the worst of it and are approaching the exit, a clown jumps out and grabs at my dad’s arm – coincidentally, the same arm which is holding on to me.
I scream and then as if by automatic reflex, dad’s free arm swings back and around and connects with the clown’s nose. The clown falls back with a thud. He then surprises us both by jumping up and screaming in our faces, “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?” He yells this over and over again, “WHHHYYY?” All the while, blood pouring out of the clown’s punched nose seems to be going everywhere.
After my work meeting wraps up, I call my father and ask him if what I recalled had actually happened the way I had remembered it.
He said, “Damn straight. That clown deserved it. He scared the s*** out of me.”
And it was with this revelation, ‘BOOM!’, Mr Noseless was banished from his nighttime visitations. It was that easy. Having said that, I am still quite mentally scared by it all. I have coulrophobia.
The dictionary defines coulrophobia as ‘an irrational fear of clowns’.
I image myself in a Coulrophobic Anonymous meeting: “Hi, my name is Sandra and I am a coulrophobic. It’s been 50 years since the trauma of the Carny Clown and, irrational or not, I still hate clowns.”
I do believe it is a known fact that clowns are inherently evil. Mr (Alice) Cooper gets it, as per his ‘Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me’ song lyrics, released in 2003:
“It happens to me every night
Can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me
They always want to take a bite
Can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me
And if you think this isn’t real
I’ll show you wounds that never heal
To them I’m just a happy meal
Can’t sleep, the clowns will eat me”
I love the nod to Ronald McDonald within these lyrics, with the mention of the ‘happy meal’.
But the sad truth of the matter is, I can’t even bring myself to sit next to Ronald McDonald at our local McDonald’s. Yes, despite the company’s marketeers wisely retiring the character in 2016 (due to ‘bad clown’ press at the time), our local McDonald’s still has a life-size, reclining statue of him on a seat in the kids’ play area. This ‘Seated Ronald’ has an ankle resting on the other leg’s knee and has an arm extended across the back of the seat. You know the pose.
So logically, you could think, not being able to share a bench with something which is obviously fake (‘uncanny valley’ fake if you ask me), is exactly the kind of behaviour that proves my fear is totally irrational. At times I have thought this way myself. But it is at these moments in time, when those healing thoughts come, that it starts. A disturbing sound starts to play at the back of my brain.
It begins quietly at first and then it gets louder and louder. It seems Noseless the Clown is not done with me yet. Can anyone help me, please? How do I get the peals of evil-clown laughter out of my head?
THE END (I WISH!)